A Beetle in Teotihuacan
A Beetle in Teotihuacan
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
The echo of the explosions at the Pyramid of the Moon not only shattered the age-old silence of the City of the Gods, but also definitively tore away the veil of ideological innocence that Mexico believed it possessed by right. The incident, perpetrated by a lone wolf, is presented to the public as the eruption of a narcissistic nihilism that, under the veneer of outdated mysticism, carried out a blood ritual in the heart of Mexico's indigenous heritage. A young man from Morelos, trapped in a profound alienation, decided to inhabit the body of a Nordic warrior to purge his resentments against modernity.
As analyst Carlos Ramírez has aptly pointed out, this event represents the irruption of far-right terrorism at a time when the struggle for the indigenous past has become the center of the national discourse. It is paradoxical that, while the presidency asserts sovereignty against the old Spanish empire, a lone wolf decides to desecrate the sacrificial grounds to pay tribute to a foreign cosmogony. Jasso, who signed his literary ravings as Vilhjálmur M. Marsson, was a collector of perverted myths for a worldview where politics is replaced by biological destiny and the mysticism of blood. Jasso's profile evokes the Thule Society, that esoteric organization that served as the ideological foundation for National Socialism. Like the members of that shadowy circle, Jasso fed on an identity-based desperation that sought redemption in runes and an imagined intellectual superiority. It is no coincidence that his motivations bear the shadow of figures like Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, architects of a racial religion that despised Christian humanism in favor of a bellicose paganism. Rosenberg argued for the need to replace old truths with a faith in blood, an idea that Jasso transferred to the Avenue of the Dead by identifying with the figure of Thor, the hammer of the gods, whose cinematic aesthetic he edited to feed his own superhuman image.
The date of the attack, coinciding with the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth and the Columbine massacre, confirms that Jasso operated according to a ritual calendar logic. For him, Teotihuacan was the perfect power node, a point of telluric energy similar to those described by François Ribadeau Dumas and Hans S. Bauer in their treatises on occultism and secret societies. Jasso saw himself as an initiate, a link in the chain of a spiritual elite that included Freemasonry, which he never truly understood. It is vital to clarify that Freemasonry, with its imperative of universal brotherhood and philanthropy, is the antithesis of nihilistic hatred. However, his rhetoric mixed Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theories with Thule Mysticism, an intellectual confusion that Oswald Spengler had already warned about in his work on the decline of the West when speaking of the final phase of civilizations, where rational thought is devoured by a new, magical, and violent religiosity.
This “spiritualism,” which some anthropologists have linked to Mexicanist movements or followers of national transformation, took a dark turn in Jasso’s work. Unlike the mysticism of Antonio Velasco Piña or the narrative of Patricia Zarco in "El séptimo cadete", which seek a spiritual reconnection with Mexican roots, Jasso filtered Teotihuacan archaeology through the German Black Forest and Goethe’s demon. His attacks directed at Canadian and American tourists demonstrate that his racism was not a loyalty to Hispanic culture, but rather a hatred of the liberal order of the North, a declaration of war by a “Vengeful Mars” against the materialism he considered decadent.
Mexico must become aware of the constant reality where young people, outside the productive system but imbued with an exclusive, esoteric online narrative, can become executors of imported ideological terrorism. The warning has been issued at the top of the pyramid: violence is no longer solely the domain of the cartels, which also employ youth armies, but has found a new breeding ground in the mystique of resentment. The lone wolf died believing the gods had chosen him, leaving behind the trail of a .38 caliber revolver and a historical void of attention. Faced with a lack of prospects and a future in a productive system that provides meaning, Mexican youth find in the mystique of hatred a territory where they can be "someone." In the eternal City of the Dead, an ideological mindset has crashed against the sacred past, reminding us that nihilism, when cloaked in myth, is the deepest threat to the soul of the nation.
